“Those square, unenlightened, irresponsible parents… the ones who outsource their children’s education, even before the child is old enough to string together a complete sentence.

“Horrors!”

My life’s dream has been to live on an urban kibbutz where everybody is part of one large, extended family, and everybody takes care of everybody.

Good luck with that one. My visits to actual kibbutzim have yielded a far less benign and dreamy reality, and some of my best friends are still trying to get rid of their childhood stammering and night sweats from having been raised in the dreaded “children’s room” on a kibbutz.

Still, I believe that raising our own children and teaching them is good for us. I’m no rabbi, but I do believe that the initial commandment to teach our children stuff falls on the parents, and the teachers we hire serve as our messengers, because we can’t earn a living and teach our children at the same time.

Diane’s dilemma is so 21st century, though:

“I work from home and charge by the hour, and there is just no way to compile an honest time-sheet for work done with one hand while the other tries to prevent the Child from pouring from her sippy-cup into the keyboard dsothattyingtotyeedsultdsinthids.”

“As a seeker and a Jew, I found myself in my adult life identifying as Jewish (a Consecrated, Bat Mitzvah’d and Confirmed Jewish Woman), without really understanding what it is the Jews believe in… It’s only been in the last 5 to 10 years that I started to learn, after attending ultra-religious ‘Beginner’ High Holiday services at Aish HaTorah in NYC…

“Those feelings—questions, doubts, all the rest—came up while I was laughing my way through ‘The Rabbi’s Cat,’ and are a big part of why I found this comic so affirming.”

She concludes:

“Overall this entire book ends up being less about the cat and more about the Rabbi. It’s about the Rabbi’s dedication to God and to Judaism as he faces the challenges of potentially losing his position (a misunderstanding) to a younger Rabbi, and losing his daughter to the same young man. He goes on a journey both physically and spiritually as he travels with his daughter and her new husband (and the cat) to Paris from Algeria.”

Read Nina’s review, which is extensive and well written, and, I hope, get Sfar’s promising comic book – I know I’m going to.

WHY DO WE EAT DAIRY ON SHAVUOT

Here’s the first installment of something I’ve been meaning to do for some time, trace the sources of Jewish stuff online, and bring a plethora of Internet info, some of it, if I’m lucky, contradictory, and, better yet, funny.

Thanks to “4Torah” for their amazing Torah search engine, which cuts out the drivel and serves up only relevant results. And thanks to Dov Bear who included a link to their site in his entry.